Poets' Corner

Number Sixteen : 20^th December 2013

Sylvia & Emily

The boundary between Lancashire and West Yorkshire lies in moorland country. In both counties there are Methodist chapels in Pennine villages of black gritstone terraced cottages , once the homes of hand-loom weavers. On the proximate slopes , grazing sheep wander among the ruins of scattered hill farms and huddle behind reservoir walls. The moors themselves are an upland wilderness of peat , sphagnum moss , heather and cotton grass in summer , spindrift-covered ice-dunes in winter. Often shrouded in mist or cloud , they present a strange and forbidding aspect to the casual visitor , particularly on the frequent days when they're swept by moaning winds and driving rain. To hiking devotees they offer an atmospheric appeal akin to that of deserted settlements for dreamers of a distant past.

In the 1950s Ted Hughes brought his American wife Sylvia Plath to visit his home town of Mytholmroyd in the Calder valley. During that stay she wrote a number of poems inspired by their walks on the moors :

There is no life higher than the grass tops
Or the hearts of sheep , and the wind
Pours by like destiny , bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention , they will invite me
To whitening my bones among them.

This proved prophetic after her suicide in 1963 , when Ted buried her in Heptonstall graveyard. This hamlet above Hebden Bridge has become a tourist attraction known for for its nineteenth century ambience. Only eight or nine miles away from it is the foremost tourist venue in this part of the world , the village of Haworth. Here is the Bronte Parsonage and all the other commemoratives of the money-spinning reputations of those scribbling sisters of nineteenth century fiction. Take a literary pilgrimage back in time , from Plath's gravestone (regularly disturbed by twentieth century feminists protesting Ted's role before her suicide) , across the intervening moors to the Haworth vault in which all the Bronte family bones lie. Your moorland ramble takes you past the roofless , skeletal remains of Top Withens , reputedly the Wuthering Heights of Emily's classic novel (itself the inspiration for Kate Bush's hit song). In its eighteenth century heyday this must have been a house of considerable wealth , as its dressed stone buttresses and mullion window spaces still suggest …. but now only sheep and ghosts of the past find shelter here.

At the conclusion of Emily's one and only novel , Cathy offers a suitable postscript to Sylvia's ruminations as she “listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass , and wondered how anyone could imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” For sensitive souls like Sylvia and Emily , the moors may have seemed like a terrestrial version of the vast emptiness of outer space – an appropriate background to our tenuous hold on individual life. Roman roads and Anglo-Saxon packhorse routes traversed them before the Enclosures transformed them into the privately-owned lands they remained until the later twentieth century. What higher purpose lay behind those confiscations of common land ? Evidence is to be found in the form of regular lines of shooting butts for rich men to crouch in , armed with the shotguns that remind the plump , flapping grouse of their tenuous hold on individual life.

Archive

Poets' Corner #1 – Poetic Pessimism, 13^th September 2012
Poets' Corner #2 – The Workman's Friend, 10^th October 2012
Poets' Corner #3 – On The Trail of Two Dylans, 12^th November 2012
Poets' Corner #4 – Omar Khayyam, 14^th December 2012
Poets' Corner #5 – William Blake, 25^th January 2013
Poets' Corner #6 – A Minor Poet, 19^th February 2013
Poets' Corner #7 – Thomas Hardy, 20^th March 2013
Poets' Corner #8 – Shakespeare's Sonnets, 21^st April 2013
Poets' Corner #9 – Edward Thomas, 20^th May 2013
Poets' Corner #10 – Harry Smith's Anthology, 19^th June 2013
Poets' Corner #11 – William Plomer, 21^st July 2013
Poets' Corner #12 – Ghosts , 20^th August 2013
Poets' Corner #13 – William Dunbar, 20^th September 2013
Poets' Corner #14 – Bathtub Thoughts, 20^th October 2013
Poets' Corner #15 – Bagpipe Music, 20^th November 2013
Poets' Corner #16 – Sylvia & Emily, 20^th December 2013
Poets' Corner #17 – The Fall Of Icarus, 16^th January 2014
Poets' Corner #18 – Those Gone Before, 20^th February 2014
Poets' Corner #19 – Rudyard Kipling, 20^th March 2014
Poets' Corner #20 – Martin Bell, 20^th April 2014
Poets' Corner #21 – Another Modest Proposal, 20^th May 2014
Poets' Corner #22 – Thomas Gray and The Eighteenth Century, 20^th June 2014
Poets' Corner #23 – Edgar Allan Poe, 18^th July 2014
Poets' Corner #24 – Tread Softly, 19^th August 2014
Poets' Corner #25 – Mad To Be Saved, 24^th December 2015
Poets' Corner #26 – Wants, 20^th January 2016
Poets' Corner #27 – Samuel Johnson, 15^th February 2016
Poets' Corner #28 – T.S.Eliot, 10^th March 2016
Poets' Corner #29 – Alfred Lord Tennyson, 18^th April 2016
Poets' Corner #30 – Leonard Cohen, 12^th November 2016